Transcription
How concerned should we be about the growth of artificial intelligence? What can the Bible, and in particular the book of Revelation, contribute regarding our age of intelligent machines? Dr. John Lennox is back to discuss his new, fascinating book, *God, AI, and the End of History*. Dr. Lennox, thanks for coming back.
>> My pleasure.
>> Let's jump right in. And at the beginning of your book, you talk about a number of concerns people have about artificial intelligence, such as ethical considerations being outpaced by technology, the idea that AI robots will take over the world. What concerns you most about the growth of AI and why?
>> There are several things that concern me about the growth of AI, and they cover quite, quite a, a wide range. Mhm.
>> Firstly, we're talking about the AI that actually is working. Uh, as most of the people watching us will know, there are two kinds of AI. There's the AI systems that do one and only one thing that normally requires human intelligence. So, it's called artificial intelligence. It's not real intelligence. And there are thousands, if not millions now, of different AI systems, some of them very beneficial. For example, being used to develop drugs and, uh, solve complex problems in logistics and so on. But also, many of these are dealing with the area of pattern and vision recognition. And so they can be useful to police to find out criminals in a crowd by facial recognition. But it's well known that in parts of our world, particularly in Sing Jang in China, the very same systems are being used to repress people. And that's one of the big issues that is the rapidly increasing intrusive surveillance that this very sophistication enables. In a sense, it's not merely facial recognition anymore. They can recognize you by your gait. In other words, from the back. And you hear stories about factories where if you're not smiling coming in, the door will not unlock because the thing is trained on your face to see if you are like that. And in some schools, it's being used to see if children are bored or if they're,
>> recalcitrant, or if they're annoyed, or if they're, if they're happy. So we're entering a new regime of intrusive surveillance that is being used by an increasing number of governments. So that's one side of it. Another side of it that's cropped up recently is AI, particularly ChatGPT and these bots that become companions of people. And what they often do is simply reflect the inner goings-on in the minds of the people who are consulting them. And that's all very well if you're just asking for information. But folks are treating these bots almost like interaction with individuals. And we're now hearing about AI-induced psychosis because those interactions start messing up with the brain. If everything you say is reinforced by an AI, it will reinforce your delusions. And so it has been recognized by the medical profession that this is a very serious threat to human stability.
>> So that's another one. And of course, there's the ever-present pornography, which is destroying so many people's lives and so easily accessible and becoming more sophisticated all of the time. And you could go on and on, and you'd still only be talking about the stuff that's actually working. You wouldn't be talking about the science fiction side of it, as I call it, where we're talking about robots overtaking the world or becoming super-intelligent. We can talk about those if you want, but a lot of that is pie in the sky, really. It's, it's fictional. It's not going to happen. Uh, it may, we may approach something like that, but we're not going to get there for very good reasons. So it is from that point of view, scary. The, the final one I would mention is the one that's often uppermost on people's minds. This technology is robbing many people of their jobs.
>> And, uh, I heard of one, I think it was a trading floor, where they used to have 850 people. Those people have been replaced by artificial intelligence plus two humans, and that's it.
>> And the problem there is that it's all very well for folks to say, you can reskill and you can become an expert in AI. But that is really only true in the West, where we've got the educational infrastructure to upskill people into these areas. In many places like Africa, where I've been, they just don't. And what they fear is a hugely increased gulf between the rich and the poor. So the world is changing fundamentally through AI systems. And of course, uh, perhaps a final thing.
>> Yeah. Uh, which is scary is the whole business of fake news and also the ability to take a very brief video and speech of you or me and make us say anything that the controllers want said.
>> And that could lead to the greatest deception that the world has ever seen. Now, if you step back from that, one of the things that strikes me, and it's relevant to your comment on the Bible, the book of Revelation, the thing that Jesus warned about most in the future was deception.
>> And that's no accident. We're now capable of bringing deception to billions on a grand scale that's very hard to detect. So the Bible's spot on that deception is going to be a huge issue. You cited something in the introduction to your book that I hadn't heard of before, that in 1945, scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer created a doomsday clock about how some man-made catastrophe will result in the end of the world. So not a comet, not something natural, man-made catastrophe. In 1947, they set it at seven minutes to midnight. Last year, it was moved forward 90 seconds to midnight. How concerned are you that something like AI would result in the end of the world? Or is that what you referred to earlier as more science fiction?
>> Well, I, I think yes and no.
>> It's more complex than that. Certainly, AI systems are being used to wreak havoc on the planet at the moment in artificially intelligent guided weaponry. And that's a huge area. And if you've noticed, an increasing amount of fighting is not done by soldiers. It's done by drones, right?
>> That are controlled on the ground. And some of the most lethal incidents in the tragic war between Russia and Ukraine, it's the drones that are doing most of the damage. And they've developed ways of swarming them so that these drones, which can be of all kinds of different sizes, are just lethal. And certainly, that could, if you just think about it, that could cause havoc on the entire planet if it's, if it's scaled up. But I'm a Christian believer. So I take very seriously what Christ and the apostles say about the future in the New Testament. And in the end, my hope is placed, well, it's the central hope of the Christian faith, but we don't talk about it enough. And that is that God will eventually step in in terms of the return of Christ and put an end to all of this and take over the government. But before that happens, it does seem to me, not only from the, uh, scripture, but actually from what's happening in the world, that there's a convergence of ideas. Let me illustrate that by,
>> Sure.
>> Peter Thiel was in, uh, Oxford not long ago, and I went to hear him speak. He's doing a lot of talking about Revelation and the Apocalypse these days. Yes. And I wanted to clarify, or him to clarify for the audience, what he really believed. So I asked this question. I said, "Peter, do I understand you correctly? When, as a technology expert, you are concerned with technology outpacing us and eventually damaging the human race and possibly destroying it?" That's on the technology side. And you also read in the Bible things that are similar. And a great deal of your concern is because the two things seem to overlap. In other words, the biblical scenario is very close to the technology scenario. And he said, "Yes, that's exactly how I see it."
>> And, and that's why I ventured to write this final book. Now, I need to tell you that the title is a bit misleading.
>> *God, AI, and the End of History*. The subtitle is the important thing, which is *Understanding the Book of Revelation in an Age of Intelligent Machines*.
>> Now, the title has given some people the erroneous impression, ha, this is Lennox's latest book on artificial intelligence. It isn't. My most recent book on AI is the revised edition of *2084*, where I go into these dangers at all kinds of levels, from the family, business, science, everything else. That's the book that deals with it. But the publishers felt it was good because I mention AI in connection with Revelation in expounding the book. But it's an exposition of the book of Revelation where I attempt to show people that we need to start taking this book seriously.
>> Well, at the heart of Revelation is the idea, of course, that Jesus is God. He's the preeminent one, and he's coming back. Some of the last words I gave, my church taught in Revelation two summers ago, and I taught in Revelation 20, the millennium, and then Revelation 22, the last words of Jesus, where he says, basically, you know, "I'm coming soon. Amen." What gives you confidence 2,000 years later that Jesus is actually coming back?
>> A very good question, sir. Ah, well, you observed something very interesting. I'm fascinated, amongst many other things, in the way scripture is structured as literature, to start with. And in the book of Revelation, you point out that in the final chapter, it happens three times over: Jesus says, "I'm coming soon."
>> But in the first chapter, twice it is said that God is coming soon. And that's unusual. I am. He that is, was, and you'd expect, and shall be. Just going through the tenses of the verb to be. But no, the God who is, who was, and who is to come.
>> Amen.
>> That's repeated twice in the first chapter. And in between them, there's the verse that explains how he will come.
>> "Behold, he is coming with clouds, and every eye shall see him." In other words, this is picking up a very ancient idea from the Old Testament, the concept, and we very rarely hear about it, but it's biblical, very clearly, of the coming of God. And the Psalms talk about it: "Mountains, clap your hands, and may the hills sing," and things like that, "for God is coming to judge the world." And that was one of the great expectations, particularly of people who were suffering, that one day God would do something about it and step in and bring justice. And what Revelation pinpoints there at the beginning is, if you ask how God will come, then you are referred to something very specific: that Jesus will come. Now, why do I believe that? One of the very interesting things is that Jesus did something at the end of his earthly ministry to show the disciples exactly what his coming meant. Luke, who was a brilliant historian, but also was a medic, and therefore probably trained in the best science of his day.
>> Sure.
>> Is the only scientist who writes in the New Testament. And at the beginning of Acts, he describes a scene where, um, Jesus bade farewell to the disciples, and then he ascended before them. And to their utter amazement, two figures appeared and said, "You men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven?" Gazing. That's looking with your eyes. That's visual comment number one. "For this same Jesus shall so come as you saw him go into heaven." In other words, the Christian teaching about the ascension, where Jesus physically rose and then disappeared. He didn't, by the way, just go up and up and up and up to teach us that this is a three-decker universe with hell beneath and heaven above. It's much more sophisticated than that. He went up physically, and a cloud received him from their sight.
>> And what Luke, the sane, medically observing, brilliant historian, says, "They saw it. They saw it. They saw it." And they were told that the ascension is a visual thought model for us to imagine its reverse happening: Jesus coming on the clouds of heaven. And that, for me, is the way into this. Now, why I take it seriously as a scientist, because I am not an anti-supernaturalist. I believe that scripture gives us lots of evidence that this world is not the only world there is. And the central teaching of the early apostles was to blow apart that naturalistic worldview and teach that they were witnesses of Jesus rising from the dead. And just as he rose from the dead physically and literally, so he will return. It is supernatural. And I'm not ashamed to say so, because there's nothing in genuine science that contradicts it. So that's the way I would begin to step into this arena.
>> I love that. Now, of course, skeptics are saying you haven't established the New Testament is reliable, and Jesus is God, and he did miracles, and that's a separate conversation. But if Jesus has,
>> Yeah.
>> And that weighs into this. If Jesus has risen from the grave, his words have authority, and this book is reliable, it gives us confidence Jesus is coming back. I think that's fair. Now, when I saw this book, I actually thought I was like, "Oh my goodness." Because you and I did an interview on your book *2084* maybe three or four months ago. I thought, "There's no way he's written a book this big on AI in like six months." And I realized, oh, the way into Revelation is through our cultural moment of AI. That makes sense because there's competing claims about how the world will end and who we should trust. It makes perfect sense. But tell me, why just in two things in our cultural moment and in your life and career, why a commentary on Revelation now?
>> Well, as you look at me, you'll see an 82-year-old man, and I'm in the natural way of things, coming towards the end of life. And one of the big things as you get older is scrutinizing rigorously what ground you have for hope.
>> Amen.
>> And the New Testament teaching is very clear that we have been born again onto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And in the whole context of biblical teaching on the resurrection, the central hope then becomes the return of Christ. And when Paul is explaining to the church at Thessalonica exactly what a first-century Christian conversion looked like, he talks about the Thessalonians turning, uh, to the living God from idols to serve a living and a true God and to wait for his son from heaven. In other words, they were to do two things. They were to serve God actively, but they were to have an eye towards the future, that they had real hope. And the importance of that's very simple. If you watch politicians, no one is interested if they only talk about the past. We want to know what they're promising to do in the future. And if you've no program for the future, no one's going to listen to you.
>> That's right.
>> And it is not surprising, therefore, to me that the most attacked parts of scripture are the beginning and the ending.
>> Because if you don't have a past, you don't have an identity. And if you don't have a future, you don't have hope. So we're dealing with the big story, the meta-narrative of scripture. And therefore, here's the tragedy: that we've got a whole book at the end of the Bible that is framed, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, by the coming of Christ, and in all the details it gives, and we become afraid of it. We become afraid of it because people have used it to support all kinds of fringe doctrines, etc., etc. And often, particularly in the past, it was so interpreted that it had no relevance to the present. When, in fact, the people of the New Testament were buttressed by it by giving them a clear goal to live for that affected them morally in the present moment. Let me put it this way. John's letter puts it perfectly what's going on. He talks about the hope of heaven and of Christ's coming in particular. And he says, "The people he or she who has this hope purifies themselves, even as he, that is Jesus, is pure." And you'll notice that it doesn't say they *should* purify themselves. It says they *do*. In other words, you can test very easily whether a Christian has grasped the meaning of the coming of Christ if it's having a moral and spiritual impact in their life. Now,
>> it's idle just to talk about it when our lives don't correspond to it. And that's the challenge that needs to be brought out by teaching the book of Revelation having an eye to the fact that it's multi-dimensional. It was relevant, totally relevant to seven contemporary churches in the Middle East in the first century. But then it goes way beyond that because it is, as it itself claims, a prophecy. And what I've tried to do, I don't know whether I've succeeded, but the response has been very interesting so far. I've tried to draw lines from that into our contemporary situation to show people this is highly relevant and powerful stuff, all of it.
>> I love that. Now, you talk about in the book, at the very kind of, very beginning, you frame how we traditionally look to religion to give us hope and to save humanity, and yet now technology has kind of replaced religion in this regard, that now we look to technology rather than we look to religion. Of course, you're saying we should not just look to religion, but we should look to the Christian religion and faith, and in particular, the future as laid out in Revelation. Now, if you were going to sum up the core message of Revelation, what's the heart of the message?
>> Here's what Revelation is about. The book of Revelation is full of singing, which is remarkable because it's also full of a sequence of judgments. This is God finally stepping in to deal with all the sin and rebellion in the world. And yet, it rises to several climaxes, all of which have to do with praise and singing. And that's remarkable, just as a phenomenon to observe that, because if you read it correctly, it will cause you to sing. It'll cause your heart to be full of joy. If you read it incorrectly, it won't. So if we come out of it fighting each other and all this kind of thing, we haven't understood it. The central thing, to go to your question directly, is it is a revelation of Jesus Christ. Now, the word "of" can be thought of in two directions. First of all, it reveals Jesus Christ. It is an apocalypse. It is an unveiling. In other words, when I read it, I should be getting to know more and more about Jesus Christ. That's why it's so important. You could also think of that as saying it's a revelation of Jesus Christ in the sense that he gave it. But in the end, it amounts to the same thing, because its central figure is the Lord Jesus himself. And therefore, you can see that building up, because the first vision in the book is the section dealing with the seven contemporary churches in Asia Minor. But before that, there's a vision of Christ in his risen glory on earth, walking among these lampstands. And the symbolism of the book is very interesting, because, and we can understand how it works by this first thing. What I mean by that is many people think that the book of Revelation is full of code, and when you see a lampstand, you ask, well, what is that or who is that? And you're told it's church, and then you say, okay, I've got it. That isn't the point of it at all. The point of it is the exact opposite. It's looking as at churches as lampstands. That is, as sources of light.
>> So what God is concerned with in this first section, chapters 1, 2, and 3, is to increase the witness power of the churches by appearing to them in all his glory. And if you look at him, he encapsulates several sources of light. His face is shining as the sun in its strength. And that's curious, isn't it? If his face is like that, why do we need lampstands?
>> If he's illuminating it, it, there's so much teaching if we recognize the way the symbolism is being used. And Jesus appears dressed as a judge, with all the eyes like a flame of fire, and all this kind of thing. And the logic of the book is very simple. The book is full of a series of judgments. The first question to ask about that kind of thing is, what kind of a throne or authority is behind that? And so the first is to see that behind it, Jesus speaks to the churches and judges them before he judges the world. That's the biblical order, isn't it? And Peter,
>> first the house of God, and then the world, according to Peter, is judged. And the second vision in Revelation is a throne. Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 are a logical sequence justifying, revealing to you the nature of the authority that's behind the judgments. And I find that extremely powerful and very relevant.
>> So the central message is to reveal Christ, but certain aspects of him. And in the churches, and we're members of churches, we need to take that first section seriously because we'll discover that the risen Lord is interested in three things. He's interested in what we believe, our doctrine. He's interested in how we behave. And he's interested in what quality our love for him has.
>> And that analysis, it seems to me, carries the book and challenges us at the deepest level.
>> Tell me if this is fair. That's really helpful. If I said Revelation, like if I was going to send out an X, a tweet, and I said, it's about Jesus being the first and the last, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, who has defeated the powers of this age in the past and fully to come. So trust him and worship him and rejoice in the present. Is that fair?
>> Yeah, absolutely. And in, in amongst those is the fact that he has loosed us from our sins.
>> M.
>> The big problem with all the futuristic scenarios involving AI technology and everything else is they avoid the problem of human sin.
>> And that has been the tragedy in history. People have tried to make utopia without facing the flaws in human morality, and so they've created a bloodbath. So you write specifically, this is a quote from your book. You said, quote, "The Christian worldview would have little or no credibility if it did not hold out a realistic vision of the future." And yet, this so-called realistic vision of the future in Revelation exists in a 2,000-year-old apocalyptic book that seems mythical, filled with beasts, wars, and battles. How is that realistic, Dr. Lennox?
>> Well, it's very realistic because what it does, as C.S. Lewis pointed out long ago in another context, it educates our imagination. And Lewis taught me a great deal. And here's one of the fundamental principles he taught me: When you see metaphors, symbols, the beasts, and all this kind of thing, the untutored reaction is, well, this stuff isn't real. And Lewis pointed out that all metaphors stand for realities. And so the challenge is not who the beasts are, but what they are. They're wild beasts, and they symbolize empires. Now, why would you use wild beasts to symbolize empires? Well, this is something that occurs in the Old Testament, particularly, but in the book of Daniel, and we can understand it immediately because so many world empires then and now behave like wild animals. They are a moral.
>> And the use of that kind of symbolism is to get across to us that these are real. That is, there's a metaphor, of course, the Bible is full of metaphors. And I always give people an elementary lesson in grammar before I get into the beasts and so on. People say, you know, "You must take the Bible literally." And I say, "You don't." And they say, "We do." Well, I say, "Okay, have a go at this then. Jesus said, 'I am the door.' You understand that literally? That he was made of wood or whatever?" And of course, they then realize what they've never realized before, that the Bible is packed full of metaphor. But now, he said, "We make a mistake. Just because Jesus is not a literal door, it doesn't mean he's not a real door."
>> He is a real door. The next level up, a real door into a real and literal spiritual experience of God. And that principle, you can carry over into the book of Revelation and instead of saying, "Well, these mythical creatures, this is all a lot of nonsense from a horror film," but to stand back and say, "Look, this is biblical language, and if you're a Christian, it's inspired biblical language, and it's meant to convey to us the nature of the reality behind it." In other words, let me give you another example of that. A lovely example. Uh, John hears a voice saying, "The Lion of the tribe of Judah has overcome." And he turns and he sees a lamb standing. Now, if I ask the question, "Who, who is the lion?" Well, it's Jesus. That's pretty obvious. And if I ask, "Who's the lamb?" That's Jesus. But that isn't the point at all. We know who it is. The first reference is to Jesus as a lion, and the second reference is to Jesus as a lamb. In other words, what is important about the imagery is not who it is, but what it is. We know who it is. But the imagery is teaching us something about the reality behind the image. And so we're to learn from that that Jesus is both a lion and a lamb, with all that that entails.
>> So I have found that that way of looking at things opens up the whole book.
>> So then, how should we read Revelation? Because I grew up in the '80s, Dr. Lennox, and there was not only like the occult scare, there was all this discussion about the end times and Revelation, and how Lindsay's books, I think he was one of the bestselling authors of the '70s, if I'm not mistaken.
>> *The Late Great Planet Earth*. I, I mean, that just, you know, people interpreted like grasshoppers are helicopters. And like you're saying, there's some real nations and events behind this. But how do we avoid reading the news through the book of Revelation and missing things and doing is Jesus instead of exes Jesus in your mind? What does it mean to read Revelation literally as far as it should go, but also responsibly?
>> Oh, you have to read it responsibly because it's a highly complex book, and it's meant to be read intelligently, as is the rest of scripture. You see, our problem is, as in the illustration, "I am the door." We never think about that in connection with metaphor. So we say, "It's literal, and it's not." So we're confused in our understanding of the way that language works. And of course, that confusion comes even greater. M.
>> I think the important thing is to have the principle of checking scripture with scripture and being genuinely humble in saying, "Well, that looks like it could be X, but it might not be."
>> Because the examples you gave, uh, many Bible teachers in my younger day, they made absolute dogmatic statements.
>> They did. And people thought these were marvelous, but then they turned out to be false, and that discredited them completely. So I've tried to be very careful in the book. I may not have succeeded, as in trying to see if there are any things in our culture that are parallel. Now, here's the principle. I came across it in a book written by a friend. He never finished it. A book on Revelation called *Tomorrow's World*. And he said, "If we believe in genuine supernatural prediction, then it may be wrong to have all our categories of interpretation in the past, you know, in terms of armies and horses and all this kind of thing. If this is relevant to the future, to our day, then surely it's perfectly legitimate to bring in the technology of our day and what's going on in our world. And just as the symbols of stinging scorpions and flying this and flying that would conjure up to a person in the first century actual insects with that were like scorpions and so on. Today, we should begin to think, is there anything in our experience that would parallel this? Because if it is the inspired word of God, it is talking about the future, not just the past."
>> That's right.
>> And that seems to me to be a key, important thing. And I've tried to do it very cautiously and carefully, and other people will add to it. I regard this as a preliminary book. You could spend all your life working on Revelation. I didn't want to do that. But I wanted to say some things that would perhaps surprise people into thinking more about it, and in showing that you can actually, if you're cautious, get a lot more that's relevant and is preachable and teachable than you would otherwise have gotten.
>> So let's take that a step further. There's a quote that you said. You said, "I have found Revelation to be highly relevant." This is in the introduction. Highly relevant to thinking and writing about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity. So AI, I'm sorry, Revelation, highly relevant to AI. And then you say, "with special reference to transhumanism." So how does a book written 2,000 years ago have special reference and relevance to transhumanism, which is clearly a modern phenomenon?
>> Uh, well, transhumanism is a very ancient phenomenon. It starts in Genesis 3.
>> Okay?
>> And that's the connector. You see, the original temptation to humans: "If you eat of this tree, you shall be as God." And if you start in the contemporary world with authors like Yuval Noah Harari, whom I interact with in my book quite a lot, his one of his best-selling books is called *Homo Deus*, "The Man God" or "The Man Who Is God."
>> And although he's no scientist, he's got a huge worldwide following. And he believes that right, evolution has got us, uh, to the human stage. But now we must take evolution into our own hands and use our own minds to ascend, excuse me, beyond the human stage, that is transhuman, and turn ourselves into gods with a small "g." So that's the biblical program. And when you ask yourself, where do we see this in history? Well, we see it all over the place, but in particular times in history, it raises its head in Genesis. It raises its head in the book of Daniel. It raises its head in the time of the Romans, where the Caesars started calling themselves gods and so on. And the key text to me in understanding what's going on here is in 2 Thessalonians, where Paul, apparently, as he says, he's only been, according to Luke, in Thessalonica three weeks. So the raw pagans, Paul teaches for three weeks, and yet in that time, he had presented them with a biblical scenario of the future that included the idea that there would arise a very powerful leader, inspired by the power of Satan, who would declare himself to be God. And then Paul says a very, very interesting and important thing. He says, "The mystery of lawlessness," and I should just explain there,
>> that this figure
>> is spiritually lawless, defying God. It doesn't mean he doesn't believe in law. It's the opposite. The Roman emperors believed in Roman law. But they were spiritually lawless. They defied God. They claimed to be God. And Paul says, in the future, there will arise a world leader who is driven by satanic power and who will be destroyed at the coming of Christ. So that brings that together. This is not a symbolic text. It's a plain theological text.
>> And it serves as a connector for the visions in Daniel, some of them in Ezekiel, and particularly in the book of Revelation, and it anchors it. In other words, however we understand this kind of thing, what is said of the man of lawlessness or the man of sin in 2 Thessalonians is said in the in Revelation and the book of Daniel. And I put two and two together and I say, at least this seems to be a convergence of ideas. In other words, the plain, straightforward theological text of, uh, 2 Thessalonians is backed up powerfully by this imagery. And if you see the imagery in light of it, it gives you confidence that the imagery is on exactly the same track.
>> The idea of Revelation, hence the title, is that there is a God who has spoken,
>> and reveals certain things who are hidden. Now, in our age of science and technology, a lot of people find the idea of revelation just incredulous, that it's opposed to reason. For those of us who believe in God's existence and that he speaks and makes himself known, revelation is not a problem. But why, in our age of science, when we can see AI and its effects, should we believe that the idea of revelation itself is even credible?
>> Well, the reason we do that is because we don't think, I may be blunt. Okay.
>> Even on a, even on a simple human level, as I understand it, there are several sources of information using reason, but another is revelation. Right on base level, let me give an example. Uh, I tell a story in one of my books that's gone around the world about Aunt Matilda's cake.
>> And this cake is baked, and she allows it to be examined by all the Nobel Prize winners from a scientific perspective: physicists, chemists, all this kind of thing. And at the end, she then says, "Well, now, thank you for all this information. Why did I make the cake?" The physicists can't say, the chemists can't say, and all the rest of them cannot say on the basis of their fields of research. They'll only know if she reveals it to them. Now, when she does, they immediately use their reason on her revelation.
>> They wouldn't understand it otherwise. And when people say to me, "Reason as opposed to revelation," I say, "Well, look, as a Christian, uh, do you believe the Bible is a revelation of God?" And they say, "Yes, of course I do." And you read it without using your reason. You don't need your reason at all to understand it. And of course, immediately they realize they're talking nonsense.
>> That's right.
>> It's that there are two ways of looking at things. And just with a simple analogy of the cake, if Aunt Matilda never speaks, we'll never know. But if she does, we will reason to see if it makes sense. The same is true of the universe. We can examine it, how it works, what it's made of. But why was it made? We'll never know unless there is a being who stands in the same relation to the universe as Aunt Matilda stands to her cake, and who reveals it to us. But we'd be fools if we didn't use our reason on reading it.
>> It's, it's a confusion of thought, you see. Um, and I think the key answer to it is this. If I can tell just another biblical illustration of this.
>> Paul was arrested on the steps of the Antonia fortress in Jerusalem.
>> And he insisted on speaking to the crowd. And the centurion was going to hold him back. And he said, "Now look," and I'm putting this now into modern English. "I did my PhD with Galiell, who's one of the top teachers of the day. I know these people. I know their language. I have a right to speak to them." Now, the secret of Paul's spiritual power was that he used his reason and he trusted God. We get into trouble, particularly we who are intelligent Christians, when we do the opposite. We trust our reason and we use God.
>> There's a very subtle difference between those two. And I think the crowd, uh, that watched Paul being arrested and listened to what he said, were very glad that there was an intellectual who was able to use his reason to challenge the, the situation that they couldn't do themselves. So what I say to bright Christians who often are worried, "You're not trusting the Holy Spirit, you're trusting your reason." Well, I say that would be a dangerous thing to do. But what we are to do is to trust God and use all these capacities he's given us: reason and all the other things that we have. So I find that helps me a great deal to sort this confusion out. Reason and revelation are not opposed. They're just different ways, importantly different ways, of getting at truth.
>> That's really helpful. And of course, in your other books, you lay out some of what you think is the scientific evidence from the beginning of the universe and the fine-tuning and DNA towards there being a mind in the universe. And if the Bible is true and Jesus did miracles, we have a God who actually speaks and has revealed himself.
>> Exactly. Yes.
>> Hence the book of Revelation. Uh, when I picked this up, I did not expect a commentary on Revelation, but was pleasantly surprised. One thing I know is I don't fully understand Revelation. I don't know if anybody does, but your book is very readable. It's very insightful. It's helpful.
>> And, uh, it's a wonderful contribution to the church as a whole and our understanding of Revelation, especially as a scientist and a mathematician. The way you approach things, I think, is really unique. Dr. Lennox, I've got a million more questions for you, but I want to respect your time and also encourage our viewers and listeners to pick up a copy of *God, AI, and the End of History*. And you might be surprised how this book written 2,000 years ago has insight and relevance for our cultural moment and how we face so much of the apocalypticism, uh, that we're hearing about from AI. So, Dr. Lennox, we will have you back anytime you're willing to come on. Such a joy. All the way from Northern Ireland. My first name, Shawn. My mom saw it in Ireland 50 years ago and said, "I want a boy. I want to name him Shawn," but I've never been to your beautiful country. It's at the top of my list. I would love to come. Folks, before you click away, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other discussions coming up on the Bible. We have a round table coming up on AI as well with some experts at Talbot and Biola with me. Uh, if you've ever thought about studying apologetics online or in person, we would love to have you join us at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Information is below. Dr. Lennox, thanks for great work. Thanks for your kindness for coming on, and blessings to you and your family.
>> And my pleasure. Thank you for your perceptive questions. And I would just say to people who read my book, don't try to read it all in one night. And certainly, it is not the final answer in Revelation. Like you, I don't know all about it, but I'm hoping just to present something to get people going.
>> Well, we'll end with the final word in Revelation, which is Amen.
>> Bye-bye.